News

We are delighted to share some brilliant news from one of our PGR students - Raad Khair Allah, has successfully published a critical reflection on Syria's war. This important piece was featured in a special issue by the Institute of Advanced Study at Leicester University.

Professor Susan Carruthers new book 'Making Do; Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World' was officially published Thursday 24 April. In this richly textured history, Prof Carruthers unpicks a familiar wartime motto, 'Make Do and Mend', to reveal how central fabric was to postwar Britain. Clothes and footwear supplied a currency with which some were rewarded, while others went without. Making Do moves from Britain's demob centres to liberated Belsen – from razed German cities to refugee camps and troopships – to uncover intimate ties between Britons and others bound together in new patterns of mutual need. Filled with original research and personal stories, Making Do illuminates how lives were refashioned after the most devastating war in human history.

The Sunday Times featured the publication as 'book of the week' and the Daily Mirror ran an exclusive two page feature about the book.

For more information about Prof Carruthers new book visit Cambridge University Press website.

‘This is a necessary inoculation for anyone prone to nostalgia. Making Do is proof that clothing is always a reflection of the human condition - especially when those conditions are dire. Carruthers deftly brings the historic significance of wartime down to the human level, with entertaining interludes and well-researched stories that will make you question your own relationship to your garments.’ Avery Trufelman - host and producer of Articles of Interest

‘From Land Girl breeches to demob suits, austerity chic to Dior’s New Look, Making Do follows the fascinating story of bodies in motion, through air raids, rationing and recycling, as a nation sought to dress the part for war and peace.’ Alan Allport - author of Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–1941

In the latest of our University Journey series – where members of our GSD teaching faculty discuss what they picked for their undergraduate degree and why – we speak to Professor Chris Dolan, who convenes on our modules Violence, Peace, and Sustainable Development, Taboo Topics, and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. He shares his experiences of his university days; from switching degrees in his second year of study to his research on internally displaced persons struggling to survive conflict in Northern Uganda.

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We are pleased to announce the publication of the report on the first School for Cross-faculty Studies Student Equity Survey.

In 2022, Sam Matthews Boehmer won the inaugural Global History dissertation prize, awarded to the best Warwick UG dissertation in the field of global history. His winning dissertation has now been published in the International History Review,Link opens in a new window and can be found hereLink opens in a new window.

A new paper from CIM member Carlos Cámara-Menoyo along with Joanna Suchomska, Wojciech Goszczyński, Pia Laborgne, Andrea Pierce, Michał Wróblewski, João Porto de Albuquerque and Simon Jirka has just been published in Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement. The paper expands on the work made at Creating Interfaces project and complements the previous paper published in Environmental Science and Policy by focussing on the lessons learnt on food procurement through the implementation of an Urban Living Lab methodology.

Abstract:

This article presents a case study on the experimental co-creation process of a digital platform supporting Sustainable Public Food Procurement (SPFP) in public kindergartens in a medium-sized city in Poland. The organisation of SPFP requires a dedicated technological infrastructure to ensure the information flow among food producers, kindergarten employees, children and parents. To this end, a digital platform was designed to enable contact, assessment of food quality and food procurement environmental impact, and the communication of needs and problems among all the actors involved in the food procurement system for kindergartens. The article also discusses the results of the field research and the method of Urban Living Labs, highlighting the key challenges faced by those seeking to combine knowledge about food and the natural environment with public food procurement. The principal difficulties include the availability, accessibility and possible application of data on the environmental costs of food production, the individualisation of needs and motivations related to public catering in educational facilities, and the specific nature of the public sector responsible for public food procurement.